Saturday, September 28, 2013

Yahoo reports that Facebook has made an interactive composite image of its nearly 1.3 billion users:

"Relax. We're not breaking any Facebook privacy rule because we don't store anyone's private information, pictures or names," [programmer Natalie] Rojas writes. "We've just found a harmless way to show 1,260,866,093 Facebook profile pictures and organize them in chronological order"

You can click here to see the composite and zoom in anywhere to see individual faces. If you move to the top left corner, you can see the earliest faces on Facebook, starting with Mark Zuckerberg at #1.

From Wired: "Clione limacina, the Sea Angel[, aka the Naked Sea Butterfly or Common Clione], is a free-swimming mollusk that ditched its shell and replaced its foot with wings somewhere along the evolutionary path. Delicate and ravenous, these marine cherubs are fast swimmers. Their primary prey are sea butterflies (Limacina), which they catch using six pointy cones stored inside their otherwise seraphic heads. When it's time to eat, Clione heads open up and reveal the hexa-jaws of doom, which can inflate to be nearly half the length of the angel's body. Above, the transition from sea angel to Angel of Death. (The White Sea, Russia/Flickr/Flickr)" (Thanks to -S.)

Friday, September 27, 2013

My last post on the demolition of French churches added to a sense of Millennial malaise this week. It came jumbled together on the micro and macro levels. A friend called to complain about a week of rude people and worse - people who are post-rude - who never knew what social conventions they violated in the first place. Another friend sent a link to a Gawkerstory about,

David Gilmour, the University of Toronto English professor who told a female reporter that he is "not interested in teaching books by women." "What I teach is guys," Gilmour continued. "Serious heterosexual guys."

A news story in a nearby town reported on a pregnant woman who was raped by two men on a well-traveled path behind her house, while she was walking her baby in a stroller. The baby was unharmed. And these days, that is surprising. Another local news story - in a normally low crime area - involved a girl who was almost abducted from the sidewalk by two men in a black van with darkened windows.

Some entertainment news stories, like this and this and this, further reminded me that the cultural means for digesting the real world malaise have descended into an impoverished atmosphere. After that, I came upon a 2005 rant in the Guardian by the British actor Sean Chapman, in which he bemoaned the degraded state of the film industry in the UK.

Tuesday, September 24, 2013

The recession has consumed another of its children. A report from Yahoodescribes the demolition of Saint-Pierre-aux-Liens church in Gesté, western France on 7 September 2013; the church was built in the 19th century and is being demolished due to economic concerns over upkeep and renovation:

The Saint-Pierre-aux-Liens, a 19th century neo-gothic parish church was scheduled for demolition in 2007 by the city council. With only the bell tower and crypt remaining, the current church will be replaced in 2016, [with a building] which will be cheaper to maintain. This destruction is part of a large debate across France where villages are faced with churches in deteriorating condition, diminishing populations, fewer parishioners and priests, and increasing upkeep costs.

Is this how mercenary materialism plays out in the end? Perhaps. But oddly enough, the trend started before the recession, in 2007, when mayors in the area of Anjou began proposing the demolition of churches. Local authorities are responsible for expensive upkeep of these buildings under early 20th century secularization laws. Nearly 3,000 churches were reported in 2007 by The Telegraphas being "in peril" because of the municipal policy of 'deconstruction'; if ever there was a definitive example of Post-Postmodernism, it is here:

A wave of threatened demolitions in the Anjou area has
sparked fears of a wider phenomenon as mayors struggle to pay for the
upkeep of the buildings, a responsibility they have held since
secularisation laws passed in 1905.

No exhaustive list of the nation's rural churches exists. However, of its 15,000 protected rural religious buildings,
2,800 are "in peril", according to l'Observatoire du Patrimoine
religieux, a religious heritage watchdog.

For some villages it is already too late. In
Saint-Georges-des-Gardes, population 1,500, a wall with rusty metal
spikes is all that remains of the parish church, built in 1870.

The edifice is the latest victim of what mayors call
"deconstruction" - a term more usually associated with the French [Postmodern]
philosopher Jacques Derrida than knocking down churches.

The mayor said a full renovation would have cost more than a million euros. It was far cheaper to build a new one. His move has emboldened several other mayors to consider following suit.

In nearby Gesté, a pretty neo-gothic church stands majestically atop the hillside.
However, the mayor, Michel Baron, has announced his intention to "deconstruct".

Alain Guinberteau, who runs a website, 40000clochers ... celebrating France's churches, was the first to sound the alarm. Without its church, the landscape of Gesté will be
disfigured, he said. "It will be cut off from its past. A part of our
heritage and history is wiped away with one bulldozer. France is viscerally attached to its rural churches, which represent the very soul of French villages."

Mr Baron said a renovation would have cost three million euros, while "deconstruction" will cost less than half that amount. "We tried to have the church listed to receive public funds,
to no avail. In its place we will put a modern hall of 500 seats, easy
to heat. Villagers have taken it well," he claimed.

However, Jean Leclerc. 62, a villager, said the decision was
shocking. "Lots of people are unhappy about it," he said. "We are not
against modernity but the village will lose a lot of its charm and
history."

The local priest, Pierre Pouplart, refused to take sides. "These are matters for the local authorities," he said.

In Valanjou, 45km away, where another church faces its last rites, locals have formed a defence association.

"There is a great deal of resistance," said René Cottenceau, 67, its president. "About 80 per cent of the villagers are against the move. The safeguard of our heritage is being overlooked. Just at a time when we are coming to appreciate the value of such buildings, ours is to be knocked down."

The church's plight has attracted the attention of the art
historian Didier Rykner, who runs the art review, La Tribune de l'Art.

"Not since the Second World War have we seen churches reduced to rubble," he said. "These mayors are the new enemy. They are in the process of
destroying the very soul of their own villages. Churches don't just have
historic and artistic value, they have intimate personal histories
attached to them - christenings, weddings, funerals."

I wonder if this is less a story about the collapse of older values and economic problems, and more a story about local government. The 20th century - with its 'Hemoclysm' that saw the deaths of some 180 million people - was an object lesson on the perils of how different states could overcentralize according to various ideologies. Practically universally, the lesson came back that overcentralizing, no matter how you do it, is a bad idea.

Despite fears from the political right wing and libertarians during the Great Recession that Keynesian-styled government spending will create bloated centralized states, perhaps the larger Millennial trend - spurred by technology - is that governments are essentially decentralizing.

Local governments were supposed to offer the antidote to Big States when the latter were crippled (to take the American example) by special interests, lobbyists, corporate sponsorship and political stalemates. Municipal and county authorities were supposed to be apolitical loci of practical, hands-on action: these officials work at the level of government where problems really get solved. The Center for Strategic and International Studiesargued in 2011 that this was the classic, yet troubling, rationale for decentralization:

The implicit rationale for decentralization goes something like this. If
a government can perform closer to the people it is meant to serve, the
people will get more out of government and, in turn, will be more
willing to accept that government’s authority. The rationale is
compelling, and despite the potential pitfalls associated with
implementation, most scholars agree that a decentralized system of
government is more likely to result in enhanced efficiency and
accountability than its centralized counterpart. Still, disparities
between the theoretical rationale for decentralization and what is
actually gained in practice are gaping.

I am only guessing that local governments are becoming stronger in unusual ways. In the French case, it might be tempting to attribute these stories to the decline of Christianity and eroding communities in France. But many citizens are very upset about France's demolished churches. Maybe deconstruction of churches is just the French 'local flavour' of a much larger pattern in the developed world. The salient question is: why are local people so helpless against the very local officials whom they elected? There is something else at work here besides changing values.

Central governments, seeking to cut costs and deficits, fob off their expensive policies and programs on local authorities. Strangely, the economic pressures on town councils offer them a 'get out of jail free card' to exercise greater autonomy and to enforce strange policies in the name of cutting costs. In other words, localities are going broke, but they're becoming more powerful because they're going broke. Another facet of this trend is the rise of municipal politicians to national levels of power. Something tells me this pattern is at work in France. Will the 21st century provide history's cautionary tales about the dangers of overdecentralization?

Monday, September 23, 2013

Just in case you needed a pick-me-up, see the video of the day below the jump: from the perspective of an eagle in flight in the French Alps, Chamonix, Mer De Glace area. Is it a real camera strapped to an eagle's back, and not a simulation? I certainly hope so (Hat tip: Joseph De Palma).